Existing User

Catherine Sullivan, 2005, The Chittendens, film still from five-channel 16mm film to digital projection. Performer: Stephanie Hecht. Courtesy the artist

Whether the 'ordinary dance' of Yvonne Rainer, the
ballet-derived language of Michael Clark or the mass, participatory
actions of artists Francis Alÿs or Katerina Sedá, each time I have
written about choreography, I have considered it in fairly specific
terms: as a form with the capacity to conjure utopian visions of
social life, and as one that might, in aesthetic ways, reinvent
relations of communality. Drawing inspiration, in part, from Andrew
Hewitt's observation of dance's combined status as depiction and
performative generator of relationships in his book Social
Choreography: Ideology as Dance and Performance in Everyday
Movement (2005), I have thought about choreography's evolution
from medieval folk to the Renaissance, and traced the origins of
'ordinary dance' in the 1960s back to ballet's role as an extension
of courtly etiquette. All of these readings of dance treat it as a
deliberate, learned manner of movement, whether practiced or
directed, with a sociopolitical dimension.

The choreography at play in Catherine Sullivan's work is
something else. Appearing to privilege internal impulse over
external form, Sullivan's work seems to be about exposure rather
than aspiration. Crystallised in emblematic works such as
D-Pattern (2005) or The Chittendens (2005),
Sullivan's choreography offers, perhaps, a register of our world
rather than a proposition for how we might live in it differently.
Dance is inherently concerned with moving: whether as physical
passage (to aesthetic ends) or as a conceptual implication of
progression, with utopian ambition. Sullivan's choreographic
movement is curiously static on both counts, however. Hers appears
as a kind of involuntary dance form, one that its performers strive
to repress.

A five-screen installation, The Chittendens, is set
partly within a suite of offices that are in

Interviewing Sullivan's collaborator Sean Griffin, Pierre-Yves
Fonfon asks, 'Are contemporary
musicians like you allowed to be influenced by soap operas?'
Griffin replies, 'I find histrionic
suspended narratives lasting twenty-five to thirty years very
interesting. […] All of this massive
drama is played out with hyperbolic emotional themes, cloying
melodies and manipulative mood
setting. […] I am a huge fan of Dark Shadows series. Its
sole purpose was that of sustaining colourful
suspense and dramatic tension for one hour every weekday for over
five years.' C. Sullivan et al.,
Catherine Sullivan, op. cit., p.55.↑

Journal

Looking at Boris Charmatz’s choreography and his project Musée de la danse, Catherine Wood argues that Charmatz reconstructs institutional frames into new spaces of attention, emanating from a dancer's perspective.

Books

Yvonne Rainer's The Mind is a Muscle (1968) stripped away the gestural conventions of dance or theatre narrative in an attempt to present the human subject on her own terms while at the same time manipulating the seductiveness of the image, increasingly being harnessed by capitalism.